The Sea and the Jungle

by H. M. Tomlinson

“Yes, but it’s all chance,” said the Englishman.

“That uncertain and impersonal will controls us. Have you ever worked desperately, the fever in your bones, at a link in a job the rest of which was already abandoned, though you didn’t know it? Yet perhaps even so there is something gained, the knowledge that all you do is fugitive, that there is nothing but an idea, which may be withdrawn without warning at any moment, under the most complicated and inspiring structure. Having that fore-knowledge you can work with a light heart, secure against betrayal, ready with your own laugh when the mockery comes. A community finds it must have a bridge; Wall Street hears of it, and finances a contractor, who finds an architect to design it. An army builds it. And then this blessed old planet moves in its sleep, and the obstructing river flows another way. Well for us we can rarely see the beginning and the end of the work we are doing. Most of the men on this job have not been here three months. They come and shovel a little dirt, and die. Or they get frightened, and go. But that idea, that remains here, using up men and forests, using up all that comes within its invisible influence, drawing in material and pressing it into its unseen mould, so that out of the invisible sprouts a railway, projecting length by length, transmuted men and timber. A courtier once gave his cloak to Queen Elizabeth to save her feet; but what is that when these men give their bodies to make an easier road for the commerce of their fellows? They say every sleeper on a tropical line represents a man. The conquering human, who lives by dying!

“The unseen idea remains—some stranger’s idea—of gain; profit out of a necessity not his, filled by other men unknown to him. You can’t escape it. First and last, it uses you. It uses you up. You may twist and double, but ‘when me you fly, I am the wings,’ as Emerson says. Once, once, I deliberately tried to escape from it, to get out of its range. I thought it was local, that idea, a mean and local urge. I believed I had escaped it too. I was young, though, then. But we all try when we’re young. There is but one way of escape—you may use up others; but that isn’t an easy way of escape, for some of us.

“No alternative but that, and a man cannot take it. There you are; use, or be used. Once I thought I had escaped. Once upon a time, every morning at eight o’clock, I went to an office in Leadenhall Street. Know that place? My first job. I was one in a crowd of fifty clerks. We sat on high stools, facing each other across double-desks. There were brass rails above each desk, where we rested ledgers and letter baskets. Each of us marked his stool somewhere with a personal symbol. My own, my sole point of vantage there, my support in life, that high stool; and I would have been prepared to maintain it upright—following our office code of honour, I as firm as may be upon it—even if, treacherously blabbing, I had had to deprive all my fellow-clerks of their supports in life. We were not a community, working out a common ideal. An idea used us. And that was a job I got as a favour, mark you. Some one had known my dead father.

“I knew the name of my boss, but that was all. I never spoke to him. I used to see him, a middle-aged man with sad eyes and a petulant mouth, clean shaved, and bald headed. He came in a carriage every morning, and went straight to a room kept from us by opaque glass. I used to wonder what he did in there. He rarely came into the office. When he did come into it, his was the only voice which ever spoke there above a whisper; a sharp, startling, and minatory voice. But we rarely saw him there. A bell would ring, a sinister summons on the ceiling over the desk of a principal clerk, and that chap would drop anything he was doing, anything, and go. I’ve seen my senior clerk, an elderly man in spectacles, jump as if he’d been struck when his bell whirred. It was such an awfully solemn place. Nobody ever thought of calling across that room, but would go round to another desk, and whisper. You felt you were part of a grave and secret plot, scribbling away to bring it to a completion, and that all your fellow-conspirators were possible traitors.

“But the plot was never complete. It went on and on, day after day, in an everlasting, suffocating sanctity, with the opaque shining glass front of the private room overlooking us, a luminous face entirely blank, though you knew the brain behind it saw everything, and was aware of all. It even knew old Beckwith, my senior, had got deeply into debt through his wife’s doctor’s bills, and had been fool enough to go to the moneylenders. His bell sprang a summons one morning; in Beckwith went; came out again, looking grey, poor old perisher, went straight to the hat rack, passed awkwardly through the swing doors, letting in a burst of traffic noise from the street, while we watched him furtively, and that was the last of Beckwith. I have heard our boss was a rigid moralist. He said a man who drank, gambled, or got into debt, not being able to control his own life, was no good for the business of another man. A system should have no bowels. Out the incompetent had to go. It was Spartan, but it paid twenty per cent., I’ve heard. Once we had a rebellious interruption of our sacred quiet, but only once. I never knew exactly why it was. We had a huge factory somewhere in the East End—Cubitt Town way—and one afternoon a woman came to the counter, and asked for the cashier. She was so obviously East End, in a shawl, that the counter clerk was shocked at the bare idea of it. She kept demanding the cashier. The clerk politely, but nervously, because of her rising, emotional voice, resisted her. She began to shout. We all stopped to see what would happen. Shouting there! She was still crying out—she wanted justice for a daughter whose body had got into a machine, I think—and the cashier was forced to appear. I was surprised that he was so quiet with her. She was weeping hysterically at our polished mahogany counter, with its immaculate blotters, and flat, crystal ink-pots, where there were men in silk hats, looking at the unusual scene sideways and smiling. She could not be pacified; and suddenly she picked up an ink-pot, and hurled it through that frozen glass face of the private room. A devastating crash. The shocking, raucous horror of blasphemy. The silence following was unendurable. We looked to the private door for outraged power to appear. Nothing happened. A policeman came and removed the woman, the cashier smiling indulgently at the officer, and shaking his head. The system, after a momentary halt, moved on again, broad, serene, and irresistible.

“I never catch the smell of an open Bible now but it conjures a picture of that arid office, angular, polished, and hard, where the ledgers before the disciplined men exude a dusty, leathery smell. But there I stayed for years, smelling it, and making out bills of lading and invoices. It was my lot. There was a junior who assisted me, a chap with flat, shiny hair parted in the middle. He had a habit of whispering about girls, when he was not whispering about the music hall last night, or the football next Saturday. When the cashier, a young man, and a relative of the boss, came walking down the avenue of desks, his sharp eyes narrowed to slits, and his mouth a little open, it was funny to see my junior put on speed, and get an intent and earnest look in his face.

“When I was done for the day, I’d get my book out of my bag, and wonder, going home, whether I’d ever see those places I read about, Java, India, and the Congo, where you went about in a white helmet and a white uniform, and did things in a large, directive way, helping Indians and niggers to make something of their country. Not this niggling, selfish, pretty chandlery written large in stone, mahogany, and glass, disguised in magnitude and gravity. Cocoanut palms and forests with untold tales. But like the boys who found fun with the girls, with music halls and football, but were afraid of the sack. I did nothing. I was even afraid of the girls.

“One day as usual I went with some of the other fellows to lunch, at an A.B.C. shop. We always went there. The girls knew us and would smile at our jokes. Small coffee and a scone and butter. My life! I found a Telegraph some one had left on a chair, and I read it more because I didn’t want to listen to that virulent abuse of our mean cashier—he certainly was mean—than because I wanted to read. In it, by chance, I noticed an advertisement for a book-keeper who would go to the tropics. That I noted. Of course, I stood no chance. But I could try.

“That night at home I wrote an application. I wrote it, I think, a dozen times, till the letter was impeccable, a thing of beauty and precision. I felt this was a most momentous affair. Whether it was the excitement of doing something in the veritable direction of romance, or whether it was through reading ‘Waterman’s Wanderings’ I don’t know, but I remember a curious dream I had that night. I was alone in a forest which made me afraid and expectant. It was still and secretive. You know the empty stage in an unnatural, rosy light, with a glorified distance in which you expect a devil or a fairy queen to appear. There was a hammock hanging motionless from a branch. Something was in it, but I could not see what. That hammock was as still as the leaves hanging over it. Then the hammock shook, and a girl rose in it and smiled at me. She was tiny, but adult, and her eyes were shining in the dusk of her hair, which fell thickly over her little, coffee-coloured breasts.